Dying Young Essay, Research Paper
John S. Ward
Dr. Larry Brunner
English Composition II
November 2, 1994
“Dying Young”
A. E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young,” also known as
Lyric XIX in A Shropshire Lad, holds as its main theme the
premature death of a young athlete as told from the point of view
of a friend serving as pall bearer. The poem reveals the concept
that those dying at the peak of their glory or youth are really
quite lucky. The first few readings of “To an Athlete Dying Young”
provides the reader with an understanding of Housman’s view of
death. Additional readings reveal Housman’s attempt to convey the
classical idea that youth, beauty, and glory can be preserved only
in death.
A line-by-line analysis helps to determine the purpose of the
poem. The first stanza of the poem tells of the athlete’s triumph
and his glory filled parade through the town in which the crowd
loves and cheers for him. As Bobby Joe Leggett defines at this
point, the athlete is “carried of the shoulders of his friends
after a winning race” (54). In Housman’s words:
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high. (Housman 967).
Stanza two describes a much more somber procession. The athlete is
being carried to his grave. In Leggett’s opinion, “The parallels
between this procession and the former triumph are carefully drawn”
(54). The reader should see that Housman makes another reference
to “shoulders” as an allusion to connect the first two stanzas:
Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder high we bring you home,
And set you at the threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town. (967)
In stanza three Housman describes the laurel growing “early” yet
dying “quicker than a rose.” (967) This parallels “the ’smart lad’
who chose to ’slip betimes away’ at the height of his fame”
(Explicator 188). Leggett’s implication of this parallel is “that
death, too is a victory” (54). He should consider himself lucky
that he died in his prime and will not out live his fame. Housman
says:
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears. (967)
Leggett feels that “death in the poem becomes the agent by which
the process of change is halted” (54). In the next stanza
symbolism is used as the physical world is in Leggett’s terms, “The
field where glories do not stay” (54). “Fame and beauty are
represented by a rose and the laurel, which are both subject to
decay,” Leggett explains (54). The athlete dying is described
here by Housman:
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girls. (967)
Any biography read on Housman should reveal that he was an big
student of Latin, a very dense language in which much meaning can
be condensed into a small word. F. W. Batesman states, “He edited
volumes of poetry for the poets Juvenile and Lucan” (Ricks 144).
Housman tried to write in the same form as the poets who he also
edited by employing “a concentration of monosyllables to provide an
English equivalent to the verbal density that Latin possessed
ready-made in its system of inflection” (144). However, this was
not always employable. Housman uses condensed, and choppy words to
express his ideas, an obvious imitation of the Latin poets. A good
example is that barely a word contained in “To an Athlete Dying
Young” consists of more than two syllables. Because of Latin
emulation, many hold Housmans’ works to be too easy. As Batesman
notices, “English monosyllables, on the other hand, because of
their familiarity and trivial associations, tend to vulgarize and
sentimentize whatever experience they are trying to describe”
(144). Housman’s attempt to reproduce a Latin-patterned verse
posts the problem Dr. Samuel Johnson referred to in his “Life of
Dryden”:
Words too familiar or too remote defeat the
purpose of a poet. From sound which we hear on
small or coarse occasions we do not easily receive
strong impressions or delightful images; and words
to which we are nearly strangers, whenever they
occur, draw attention on themselves which they
should transmit to things. (145)
As well as old time structure, Housman takes advantage of many
old time ideas and concepts in his writings. He conveys the
classic idea that beauty, glory, and all things that are held in
esteem soon outlive that fame which they once possessed in “To an
Athlete Dying Young.” So, in the premature death, the athlete is
spared the sorrow of seeing his records be broken and him losing
his talent. He will never outlive his moment in glory. He will
always be remembered as a winner at the peak of his career. An
excellent example of this is the retirement of Michael Jordan who
did retire at the peak of his career and will probably be
remembered as the greatest basketball player to ever live. This is
the concept the poet has in mind rather than trying to escape from
life. Many would have to think the young athlete was lucky because
he didn’t have to go through the rest of lifes miseries and one
would hope the young athlete is in a better place. Leggett offers
in his book Land of Lost Content:
It would be easy to oversimplify the attitude
toward death in this poem and regard death
merely as an escape from a miserable
existence, as many of Housman’s critics have
insisted. But, viewing the poem in relation
to the theme of the whole work, one must
conclude that here, as elsewhere in A
Shropshire Lad, the point not that these lads
have escaped some sort of evil inherent in
all of life, but they, instead, have escaped
the change and decay of time; and as
Housman’s coin image suggests, they have
preserved something which in itself is
valuable.” (64)
The classical idea held by Housman is, “the perfect” does
exist, this perfection, can be destroyed by time though. B. J.
Leggett says that “the poem illustrates a conception of death as
metaphorical agent for halting decay” (64). A question, who is
speaking in the poem, is often asked in and about Housmans poem on
death. Is it Housman himself, are these his views of death, or is
he assuming a personas voice in this poem? Many say that the voice
and view of death is one of the athlete’s friends and not Housman
presenting the story. Legggett, the author of The Poetic Art of A.
E. Housman, says:
Housman achieves the effect of the assertion
of two contradictory attitudes–gaiety and
grief, triumph and defeat–in a number of
poems about death. Although the ‘philosophy’
of death in “To an Athlete Dying Young” has
been discussed as an instance of Housman’s
perversity, no commentator, to my knowledge
has sufficiently emphasized that the attitude
toward death taken in the poem is that of the
dead athlete’s friend, not that of the
poet. (54)
Housman clues us in that the speaker is a friend in several
ways. First, he is telling the story as one of the people who
witnesses the athlete’s victory and cheered him through the town.
Then he is pictured as one of the pall bearers, close to the dead
athlete, who helps him into his grave. Leggett says, “The poem is
thus a kind of graveside oration delivered by one of the lads who,
presumably, ‘wore his honours out’” (54). Housman’s poem says:
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man. (967)
The conceit of the poem seems to be that, no matter what, death is
the final victor. This is made from the character of the persona,
his imagined relationship to the dead young athlete and the
occasion of the poem. To be able to understand Leggett’s view with
that of Housman’s is to confuse a technique by which the poet
conveys a hard to understand reaction to death with a philosophy,
which has no meaning outside the poem.
The sixth stanza may not seem as important as the other
stanzas in the poem, yet it still plays a major role in the play.
In Housman’s words:
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup. (967)
This along with the last stanza “Completes the comparison in the
light of what has been said in the three middle stanzas and finish
off the poem with the reference to the athlete’s glory as being
shorter lived than a girls” (186).
By dissecting this poem line-by-line, a reader can understand
the meaning Housman has behind it. Anyone who reads Housman’s
material has to read it very carefully the first few times and
really analyze what the meaning really is. When Housman uses the
small, short, and choppy words to illustrate or explain something,
he is trying to explain it elaborately. That is very effective for
this poem because the athlete lived a short choppy life, yet, be it
for only a moment, he lived elaborately.
Bache, William. “Housman’s To an Athlete Dying Young.”
The Explicator, 1951. (185)
Henry, Nat. “Housman’s To an Athlete Dying Young.”
The Explicator, 1954. (188-189)
Housman, A.E… “To an Athlete Dying Young.” The Bedford
Introduction To Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston:
Bedford Books Of St. Martin’s Press, 1993. (967)
Leggett, Bobby Joe. Land of Lost Content. Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1970.
Leggett, Bobby Joe. The Poetic Art of A. E. Housman. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1978.
Ricks, Christopher ed… A. E. Housman. Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice Hall, 1968.John S. Ward
Dr. Larry Brunner
English Composition II
November 9, 1994
Dying Young
A. E. Housman’s poem, “To an Athlete Dying Young,” is about an
athlete who dies in the prime of his athletic career and will
always be cherished for dying that way. In the poem Housman’s view
of death is shown in that if you die young, and at a pentacle of
success you die lucky.
In the first stanza the athlete had just won his race and was
brought home on the shoulders of his “townsmen.” In the second
stanza the athlete is being carried on the shoulders of his
townsmen but this time in a casket. “Shoulder-high we bring you
home, / And set you at your threshold down, / Townsman of a stiller
town.” Before the crowd was “cheering by” now the reader can see
that he is dead because of the “stiller town.”
Housman than moves in the next two stanzas and talks of how
the athlete is smart for dying young because Housman knows that
glory does not remain forever. One would believe that Housman was
a man that believed that all records were made to be broken. In
the fourth stanza Housman says:
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:
In that, we can see that housman sees the athlete as lucky because
any athlete would hate to see his record broken so this one is
lucky because he does not have to see all the glory and fame that
was his be taken away from him probably as he took it away from
another person.
With fame, it is an ongoing process, the next guy is going to
do something that is better than you, and then that guy will be out
done by someone else, and so on. Well, this athlete was lucky. He
did not have to see his record broken, nobody took the fame that he
had earned, and he will always be remembered as one of the best in
his event. Another thing about his glory is that his fans will
always have the questions about how good he could have been, thus
will always be preserved as one of the best that ever participated
in the sport.